When Kamala Harris dropped out of the presidential race, the minority female in me shivered. When Warren dropped out, my arrival at historical justice for my sex pile-drove itself through the floor boards, stopping to rest and breathe on the shoulders of a man who promised to protect my body, my home, the body that is my home. As Sanders steps out of the Republican-Democrat brawl, that hopes to end in freedom from abuse-fetishist, white, entitlement, it is hard to see if we've learned anything from the past four years.
I read somewhere, something that read along the lines of: this was the most diverse group of presidential candidates in history, and we have Trump vs Biden. A group of lawyers, senators, people who have striven towards gender, race, and wealth equality. People who have not abused their power nor fed out of the hand of someone above them and prayed that fodder would make them full. Except for these two. And I'll tell you, the fact that our choices for four more years of (faux) leadership are between two anti-progressive, 70+, rich, white, straight men who've been accused of sexual assault, is the reason our America is going to stay our America until the GenX and GenYs come into voting age.
To weigh how old the next four years might make us, :
The Republican Candidate. A business man who, sure, has seen some economic heightening, but in the process has shown his followers and picketers that TV-star money goes hand in hand with television criminality. An abuser, not a man just a bit too handsy. Sexual assault after sexual assault after NDA. Someone who has never known struggle beyond a bullying liberal media or success that was not at the physical and moral expense of another. A man who markets himself with hatred to the haters of our country, breeds verbal and mortal violence, and then humiliates Violence's victims - take the Parkland shooting. Our candidate for another four years is someone who has killed and narrowly avoided war, Soleimani, and is proud of his racism and ability to encourage racial murder. Is supported by the KKK. Donald Trump, a candidate again, somehow, in a time of international crisis, refuses to wear a face mask to protect himself from others, and others from himself, as he speaks on vaccinations there is no scientific backing for while addressing a virus he preaches misinformation on. That is candidate number one, a woman-abusing, violence wielding, willfully uneducated racist. Who is loved by a dangerous, festering, smartly loud population.
The Democratic candidate. I am a liberal, progressive even, through and through. And that is why I can't put conservatives at the stake without putting up my own too. He's not openly racist, in fact, he depends so much on his having black friends that perhaps he knows how much he owes minorities. He comes with some good, having a willingness to work with republicans and a good player for bipartisanship. His public persona is incredibly likable, representing the all-American family values that come with the supposed warm glow of freedom and a dream. But the public person ifs flaws too, when he speaks off-campaign-writer-approved script. During debates, he waivers from topics at hand, employs odd metaphors that are virtually unintelligible, and uses past resume ticks under the Obama administration when posed with difficult position questions, like in the case of reproductive rights. Though running as a democrat, he is shockingly conservative on a number of issues, for instance, Medicaid. Biden's positions are unclear on a number of topics, support of same-sex marriage and position on abortion being just two, and have only been broached as soon as they became trendy political topics. Though an opponent of Trump to an immense degree, they share more in common than one may think. Biden, too, in the sick repetitious fad of entitled old men, has a string of sexual assault accusers too. No amount of time for learning that many assaulter like to excuse themselves with make up for penetrating a girl through her skirt without permission in a Senate corridor. During COVID, he has continued to campaign and has offered minimal solutions beyond building a campaign bunker and critiquing Trump.
Another man's potential presidency has aged me back to an era where women were nothing but ornaments on a man's good suburban Christian tree, watered by a crude mix of his sperm and the fluids of all the women-objects he shoved himself inside. And though I am pushed back to a time where money and women were one in the same, greedy dirty scoundrels, and when war equated pride, my hair is grayer in the past and my back is aching on our now. Who do we choose? The one we fear less? Why is that the option we have given to ourselves? Well, I'll tell you. Because in American politics, scandal sells. Ease sells. Ignorance sells. What does not sell is logic, passion, care, or intelligence, solely because these things do not come packaged in high-decorum or delicacy. It's not sexy if our country's savior speaks loudly or wears suits too big. The moment a person without millions of dollars to their name and without hatred as a method of community-making tries their hand at fixing an obviously broken political, social, economic society is the same moment in which their efforts are deemed dead on arrival. Nothing but an inspiring, conscious voice. The reasons Sanders dropped in popularity, and Biden outranked him, are the reasons this country needed him in the first place. A man without hatred, even without an immense relatability factor. Who wants to stop policing bodies and start policing the brutality of the police. Who wants universal healthcare and education to create a society where people do not feel the impulse to hurt themselves or others to get by. Who is clear on their beliefs. But he is gone, because he did not assert his power in aggression, violence, hatred, or hinge on the success of someone else for his own.
What this country needs is not another man, not another abuser. Not a manipulation. What this country needs is an intrinsic stare into its own shallow. To ruminate in the memory of a heartbeat. To remember that being a patriot to a country full of hatred, war, and sexual gratification in place of morality, where neighbors we call our brothers and sisters have the same trigger-happy-starved faces as our killers, and our killers are in command, is to be a fool of one's own chosen ignorance. And that ignorance, America, is your self-righteous prison. What we need is to step outside of our decrepit neuron-ic cells, programmed in self interest and greed, and learn a magnanimity which was born into us - not as Americans, but as humans.
